The Reality of Providing Effective Reading Instruction
When helping a struggling reader, unless you have been doing it for sometime, you may be taken by surprise at the level of difficulty the student is experiencing. For some students, learning to read comes without too much of a challenge; Phonemic awareness, phonics, word recognition, fluency, and comprehension skills progress almost effortlessly, with proven phonic-based instruction and practice. Many students, however, will have a more difficult time absorbing some or all of these crucial reading components.
A Taste for Mnemonics
The Stevenson Program uses visual clues to help teach the full range of word attack skills, from learning letters to recognizing vowel patterns to unlocking multi-syllable words. Below, you see the mnemonic clue that teaches the letter c. Along with this clue Stevenson provides multi-sensory activities and direct instruction to elicit the hard sound of c and associate it with the letter shape. This approach to sound/symbol correspondence is thorough, but not unique. The Stevenson Program, however, takes this approach a step further.